If I hadn’t been depressed I probably would have gone out there to see how Andy was doing. It’s only a subway ride away, but the way I felt it might as well have been in Mongolia. (And I’ve been to Mongolia, and I didn’t have a good time.) Andy hung in there for all six days, and logged a total of 235 miles, and posted a race report consisting chiefly of his explanation of why he’d done so poorly, and what he’d learned from the experience. Six days walking around a one-mile loop in the park! Six days! 235 miles! That’s nine marathons in six days. And he was apologizing for his performance? Sheesh…
BY THE TIME I read Andy’s report, I’d already made a decision of my own. On the 26th of April, I printed out the entry blank and mailed off a check to the people running the FANS race in Minnesota.
I had five weeks to prepare myself to walk for twenty-four hours. I didn’t know if that was enough time, nor did I have any reason to believe my feet would be up to the challenge. They’d given me trouble at Huntington Beach, and they’d put me through hell in New Orleans.
What I did know, as I was quick to explain to Lynne, was quite simply this: Given the choice, I’d rather be hospitalized for exhaustion than depression.
AND IT WORKED.
I signed up one day and went out for a walk the following afternoon. I was out for an hour. I walked two hours the next day, an hour the day after that, then three hours a day later.
Somewhere in the course of those first several days, I stopped being depressed.
Endorphins, no doubt. Exercise, everyone will tell you, induces the brain to produce endorphins, and they in turn engender a feeling of well-being. This is all too frequently described as a “runner’s high,” and for all the running and walking I’ve done over the years, and all the feeling of well-being it may have engendered, I’ve never experienced anything I’d call a high.
But perhaps the folks who use the term neglected to spend their youth ingesting mood-altering chemicals. What do they know about getting high?
Never mind. What’s noteworthy here, it seems to me, is not that endorphins were the agent of my ascent from depression, but that essentially the same exercise that produced them had failed to do so in the weeks since I’d returned from New Orleans. I’d been walking several times a week for an hour or two, with nothing to show for it but a deepening suntan and a sweaty headband. Now, all of a sudden, the same exercise on the same course was turning me into Little Endorphin Annie.
It wasn’t just the walking. That seemed clear to me. It was the fact that signing up for the race had given my walking in particular and my life in general the illusion of purpose. I was not out there walking to feel better, or walking to stay in shape, or walking to stifle my inner couch potato. I was walking with the noble goal of preparing myself to—to what, exactly?
Why, to walk innumerable 2.4-mile laps around a blameless lake in Minnesota.
And could I do it? Did I have enough time to get in enough training? And would my feet hold up?
Unanswerable questions, all of them. At worst, I figured, I could train sufficiently to cover 26.2 miles around Lake Nokomis. That’s the length of a marathon, and if I did that much I could add Minnesota to my marathon life list. I told myself I’d be satisfied with that, but I knew I wouldn’t. I’d been in three twenty-four-hour races since July of 2005, and in each one I’d improved, albeit very slightly, on my previous performance. The most recent race was at Wakefield, Massachusetts, in July 2006, and I’d managed 66.3 miles. So what I wanted in Minnesota was to break that record. And I wanted to break it resoundingly. It would be nice to walk my age and hit sixty-eight miles. It would be even nicer to go seventy.
It would also probably be impossible, but right now that didn’t really matter. I was walking, and walking for a reason, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel genuinely good about it.
2
I’VE BEEN A WALKER ALL MY LIFE.
Well, wait a minute. That’s not entirely true. Before I was a walker I was a crawler, and before that I just sort of lay there like a lump.
Or so I’ve been told, but I can’t say I remember any of that. My conscious childhood memories are all of a time when I’d already learned to walk. I don’t even recall the learning process—getting up, falling down, getting up again, falling down again. I don’t have any trouble believing it happened, but I can’t remember it.
But I can specifically remember crawling, come to think of it. It was after I’d learned to walk, long after, and I think I must have been four years old. I couldn’t have been more than that, because we were still living on Buffalo’s Parkside Avenue, and I was not yet five when we moved a couple of blocks to Starin Avenue. And I couldn’t have been less than that, either, because I crawled across the living room floor to look at the newspaper. So I was old enough to read, or at least to make out a fair number of words.
So I’d been walking for quite some time, and I was sitting on the floor doing God knows what, and I wanted to look at the paper, and I was about to stand up and walk over there. And then the thought came to me that I didn’t have to do that, that I could just stay down there where I was and crawl. I remember thinking that would be fun, and I remember doing it, but I can’t remember if it was fun or not. My guess is that it was.
I don’t believe I’ve crawled since, except perhaps metaphorically. But I’m sure I could if I had to.
I’M SORRY I can’t remember learning to walk. Because it was a miracle.
Oh, not a personal miracle—although, given my own innate clumsiness, it might well have been a marginally greater achievement for me than for the average incipient toddler. No, I’ve come to believe that learning to walk is a remarkable accomplishment for the entire human species, and not so much a miracle of evolution as a triumph of the will.
Nobody’s born knowing how to do it. Grazing animals are on their feet and walking from the moment their mothers drop them; they have to be, or they won’t keep up with the herd. But human infants are born as helpless as hamsters, and walking is something they have to learn.
Or teach themselves, one might say. You can’t read the manual, and, except by example, it’s not something your parents can teach you. You crawl for a while, and then you stand up, and then you fall down. And you stand up and fall down again, and then the time comes when you stand up and take a few steps before falling down.
And so on.
And here’s what makes it a miracle: Every child, but for the severely handicapped, does all this and does it successfully. Some are early walkers, some are late walkers. Some fall a little and some fall a lot. But, sooner or later, everybody walks.
Nobody gets discouraged. Nobody gives up. Everybody stays with the program. And all this with no reward promised or punishment threatened, no hope of heaven or fear of hell, no carrot and no stick. Fall, rise, fall, rise, fall, rise—and walk.
Amazing.
Imagine, if you will, an adult in similar circumstances. Imagine the thoughts running through the adult mind:
The hell with this. What’s the point in getting up when I’m only going to fall back down again? If I keep this up I’m only going to hurt myself. And look like all kinds of a damn fool while I’m at it.
What was so bad about crawling? I was pretty good at it. I got around just fine. Why would God give us hands and knees if he didn’t expect us to get from place to place on them?
Who says everybody’s meant to walk? It works for some people, but that doesn’t mean it works for everybody. You need balance, for one thing, and you need good foot-eye coordination, and some of us aren’t gifted in those departments.
I hate falling down. Makes me feel like a failure. Why reinforce that feeling by repeating the process?
It’s hopeless.
What’s the point, anyway? I mean, it’s not as if there’s any place I really have to get to. What’s so bad about right here?
Screw it. If crawling’s not good enough for them, they can pick me up and carry me. Because I’ve had it.
I quit.
But that never happens. I couldn’t begin to guess what goes through a kid’s mind when he’s learning to walk, but I don’t think the possibility of giving up ever enters into the equation. Sooner or later he learns. And, once he learns, he never forgets. Why, it’s like riding a bicycle.
And there’s the rub.
I COULDN’T LEARN to ride a bicycle.
Let us be clear about this. Being unable to ride a bicycle is very nearly as incapacitating for a boy as being unable to walk. In Buffalo, where I grew up, you rode your bike everywhere. You rode it to school, you rode it to play, you rode it everywhere except for those few places so far away that you needed a bus or a streetcar, or a parent to drive you.
When I was a little kid I had a tricycle, and I could ride that just fine. Nobody ever had to learn to ride a tricycle. You put your feet on the pedals and turned them, and how hard was that? No balancing act was required, because the thing wasn’t going to tip over. You’d have to work some to make it tip over.
So I was fine on a tricycle. Then when I was seven or eight, around the time when a lot of other kids were getting their first two-wheelers, I got a four-wheeler, a weird contraption that ran on arm power; you gripped the handlebars, pulling them toward you and pushing them back, and the thing rolled forward at a pretty decent pace. I’ve never seen another one of these creatures, never knew another kid who owned one, but in recent years I’ve seen pictures of something that looks a lot like what I had, and it seems to be called an Irish Mail.
I wonder whatever happened to mine. I suppose I outgrew it, and I suppose my folks gave it away, and I suppose it’s long since been reduced to rust. And I’m not likely to turn all Citizen Kane about it, either, but I remember it fondly. And I probably rode it longer than I should have, because I couldn’t learn to ride my goddamn bike.
It was an orange and black Schwinn, if I remember correctly, and it was a one-speed machine, because that’s all that existed at the time. This was 1948, and bikes didn’t have gears, or if they did nobody I knew was aware of it. They didn’t have handbrakes, either; you braked the thing by reversing the direction of the pedals. They were, I suppose, pretty primitive compared to what kids pedal around on nowadays, and nothing you’d want to take to the Tour de France, but, all things considered, they worked just fine.
For everybody else.
I DON’T REMEMBER getting the bike. It was a major present, certainly, and I would think it must have been given to me on a major occasion, probably a birthday. I was born in June, and that’s a logical month to give a kid a bicycle. Buffalo’s winters aren’t quite as bad as you think, but they’re a long way from bike-riding weather, and a Christmas bike would be a deeply frustrating present. “Here you are, sonny. It’s all yours, and sometime in April you’ll be able to ride it.” Wonderful.
It was my father’s job to teach me to ride the thing, and we went out to the sidewalk in front of our house. I mounted the bike, he took hold of the handlebars, and he trotted alongside as I pedaled and built up momentum. Then he let go, and I fell down.
Repeatedly.
For our purposes here, I rather wish I could remember the whole process in more detail. On the other hand, it’s probably not such a bad thing that my recollection has blurred a good deal over the years. They say that childhood memories return much more sharply in later life, and maybe this one will, but if it doesn’t, well, that’s okay with me. Because it was not a happy time.
As it is, I don’t know if my dad and I devoted one day or a full week to the process. A man who lived across the street—Joe Rosenberg, who ultimately became my stepfather—told me how it had broken his heart to watch me and my father, going back and forth on the sidewalk, all to no avail. That would suggest that we tried this more than once, but my memory has collapsed the ordeal to a single day, one which concluded with the two of us returning to the house, bowed in mutual recognition that the entire enterprise was impossible, and that we were best advised to abandon it forever.
And so we did. The bike went in the garage, where it assumed the function of the Elephant in the Living Room That Nobody Talks About. Ours was a wonderful family, and I’ve always felt myself to have been sublimely gifted with splendid loving parents, but this is not to say that our living room lacked a fair number of unacknowledged elephants.
IF, IF, IF.
If they’d had training wheels in 1948, it might have been a different story. Maybe they did, and we just didn’t know about them.
With training wheels, I wouldn’t have taken a spill every time I failed to keep my balance. And I wouldn’t have needed my father to run along holding on to the handlebars, and run himself out of breath and patience while he was at it. With training wheels I could have taken the bike out by myself, and maybe I would have stayed with it, and eventually maybe I would have gotten the hang of it.
It might have been different, too, if the bike had been the right size for me. My parents were never cheap, but they and the rest of the country had recently emerged from the Great Depression, and it would be fair to say that they were frugal. They bought me a good bike, but they bought it a couple of sizes too large, so that I wouldn’t grow out of it too rapidly.
That made a certain amount of sense with clothes; you could always take a tuck in a sleeve or hem a pants leg, letting out the garment as the wearer grew into it. But you can’t take a tuck in a bicycle, and mine was indisputably too large for me. It was in fact just the right size four and a half years later, when I hauled it out of the garage and taught myself how to ride.
But we’ll get to that.
Oh, dear. Another thing that might have made a difference, a substantial difference, is if my father had been a good teacher. He was a wonderful man, a very dear and loving man, but a good teacher he emphatically was not.
I’m sure it frustrated him that I didn’t just hop on the bike and ride it, as he very possibly did in his youth. As an adult, his sole athletic activity was golf, and that infrequently, but he was a reasonably good golfer with a fine natural swing, and I suspect he was good at other sports, if not devoted to them.
I don’t know that he was disappointed in his profoundly nonathletic son, but I do know my inability to ride that bike made him impatient to end the attempt. I wasn’t learning, and that meant I wasn’t capable of learning, and wasn’t it simpler and more humane all around to cut our losses and stow the bike in the garage?
Years later, when he taught me to play golf, it went okay. I was lousy at that, too, but I could swing the club and hit the ball and walk to where it lay and hit it again. There was no falling down involved, no test of his patience. I don’t know how many times I went out and played golf with my father—eight or ten, probably, a dozen at the most—but we always had a good time of it.
He taught me to drive, too, and that didn’t go wonderfully. But we both stayed with it, and I passed my test and got my license. I learned a lot more about driving when we took road trips. He was a good highway driver, careful but not timid, and I paid attention and learned.
HE WAS A SWEET and loving man, my father was. An attorney himself, he was unequivocally supportive of my decision to become a writer, and disproportionately pleased by my early scholastic and professional triumphs. He was thirty when I was born, and he died the day before his fifty-second birthday. Now, writing about him, I’m already seventeen years older than he was when he died.
And that feels strange. How old was he when he tried to make a cyclist of me? Forty? Two of my three daughters are older than that. His death came four months before the eldest was born.
And it wasn’t his fault that I couldn’t ride a bike, nor was it the bike’s fault. It was, let us be very clear about this, entirely my own.
SEE, I FAILED to do what every crawling baby manages to do, which is to keep on trying until you get it right. My father made it easy for me to do this, regarding a temporary failure as permanent; he made it clear that it was all right for me to be unable to ri
de, and saw it as preferable to continuing frustration for both of us.
And I was happy to accept failure, even eager to embrace it. Part of this, I know, is attributable to the fact that I was an extremely tractable child—which would come as a shock to anyone who has known me only as an adult. I tended almost invariably to accept my parents’ view of what was best for me. I took piano lessons for seven or eight years because my mother, an accomplished pianist, thought I ought to; I had no feeling for the instrument, or for music in general, and I was never at all good at it or got the slightest enjoyment from it, but neither did I beg to give it up, or resent that I was stuck with it. She thought it would be good for me, and I figured she was probably right, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Beyond that, agreeing that I was hopeless as a bicyclist meant I could stop trying. An unpleasant and frustrating activity could cease. The fact that I would spend years walking while others rode, the fact that I’d be for all those years the one kid in the neighborhood who couldn’t ride a bike, was not something I needed to think about.
All I really had to do was keep at it. All I had to do was get back on the bike every time I fell off. Sooner or later I’d stop falling off, and then I’d be riding. I’d somehow known that years earlier, when I taught myself to walk. But somewhere along the way I’d managed to forget.
So the bicycle went into the garage, and stayed there. I didn’t pay any attention to it, and before long I pretty much forgot it was there.
BEFORE I CLOSE the garage door, there’s another story I’d like to tell you about my father. It’s one of which I was entirely unaware until very recently.
When I was eleven years old, I was skipped from the fifth to the seventh grade. My fifth-grade teacher, Mildred Goldfus, was a great believer in hurrying along her brighter pupils; one of three fifth-grade teachers at PS 66, she had in the past been assigned the smarter kids, taught them intensively, and dispatched them all directly to seventh grade at the term’s end.